Turing (http://turing.ubishops.ca/) is a dual G5 (the 2GHz variety), and it runs a 64-bit Gentoo installation (used to be Yellow Dog Linux, really on-line in its Gentoo incarnation since yesterday). To be more precise this is a development machine plus a HTTP/mail/IMAP server on the side, and as far as I can tell everything in this respect runs mostly smoothly (exceptions shall be summarized shortly).

What does not run (at all) is X, the server (x11-base/xorg-x11-6.7.0-r1) segfaults upon loading the bitmap module or something (I am not at the console right now so I cannot run it, but in any case it dies very early in the startup process) so not even Xeasyconf has any chance to complete whatsoever. This is by no means a huge problem but I will eventually like to make use of the nice Apple Studio display (and get rid of the second machine in my office which I use as a remote GUI), so advice is appreciated.

In any case, here is a summary of the installation process. The installed stuff (and all the dependencies) works as far as I can tell, except as noted in the list below.

At this time my ACCEPT_KEYWORDS has the value "~ppc64 ppc" but I set the variable individually for packages during the initial install to see what is keyworded how. If no entry appears in the "additional keywords" in the table below, it means that the respective package (and its dependencies, except those installed before) are keyworded as ~ppc64.

The uname/arch trick refers to the replacement of uname and arch by the following, respectively:

You are really treading in uncharted territory! I applaud your bravery. I have a bunch of laptops running linux/ppc and it can be difficult being out of the mainstream. I also have a linux/amd64 machine and it can be difficult dealing with 64 bit issues--but 64 bit on PPC? That's just nuts!

Why, thanks. As a matter of fact, Turing is pretty solid as far as its main tasks (Web/mail server and development machine) go, at least it's been so for the four-ish days since it has become Gentoo . X turns out to be a real bitch, but I'll get there eventually (this is not that important anyway). It did take a while to set it up, but it is really worth it--very nice hardware it is indeedy._________________Quid latine dictum sit altum videtur

x11-base/xorg-x11-6.7.0-r2 eliminated the startup segfault, X works with 24-bit depth (not very fast, mind you, due to the absence of agpart in the kernel, but good enough for a machine that is primarily a server ).

The working X also brought a working GNOME 2.6 (compiled before but not tested for obvious reasons), not perfect but most functionality is there.

That's it, at this time the only outstanding issue is rtc and agpart in the kernel, and maybe a working mozilla; everything else is really minor. Did I mention that after a considerable amount of time spent building and configuring I am beginning to really enjoy my full 64-bit system and the machine behind it?

Ive got a G5 going with 32 bit and Im about to build ppc64, but Ive got a couple of questions that gentoo 'oldies' might be able to help me out with.

bruda mentioned above that he needed to mod uname (which ive done too), but the trouble is that emerge'ing coretutils overwrites it, which is _REALLY_ annoying.

Is there anyway to config_protect a file? (It doesnt work for me and I dont want to protect /bin or Im assuming that will break emerge system's as the binaries wont be installed until I etc-update them).

I'd like to install X11 on a ppc64. emerge kde and emerge gnome both fail, even with ~ppc in my config.conf.

I have a working GNOME 2.6. That's the ppc one (stable), except for a couple of applications that have to be ~ppc. Take a look at bug 57658 (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57658) for details. As far as I can remember the ~ppc version of GNOME will not build.

KDE is trickier, I do have kdeutils (or something like this) installed, but I could not get a full KDE install--I did not try too hard, mind you, I am kind of a GNOME fan. Do take a look at the Gentoo Bugzilla where somebody has reported some success with KDE.

Bug 57658 says that glut will have troubles when uname -m and arch report "ppc64". I did an emerge glut while reporting my architecture as ppc64, and it appears to have installed okay, but I'm not sure how to test that; I just know I didn't notice any errors, and emerge search glut reports that it was installed. Maybe that bug has been fixed.

How and where does that replacement occur? I tried hacking a ./configure script for a package where ./configure fails due to an unrecognized architecture, and came accross some expressions that seem strange to me:

What I don't understand is how a pathname can be on the left-hand side of the expression, as opposed to a variable. What is that kind of bash expression supposed to mean? I tried the following substitution and it did not work:

Bug 57658 says that glut will have troubles when uname -m and arch report "ppc64". I did an emerge glut while reporting my architecture as ppc64, and it appears to have installed okay. Maybe that bug has been fixed.

Yes, that glut has been fixed is quite a likely possibility, a lot of people seem to want (and thus work on) a GNOME installation on these machines._________________Quid latine dictum sit altum videtur

What I did was ugly, I am sure there is a better way to do it, but anyway here it goes: I renamed /bin/uname to /bin/uname64; I then created a /bin/uname32 as a shell script containing the following:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
/bin/uname64 $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 | sed -e s/ppc64/ppc/

Finally, I symlinked /bin/uname to /bin/uname32. When done with the hack, I would change the symlink /bin/uname to point to /bin/uname64. Same goes for arch.

As korg rightly points out this setting breaks whenever one upgrades binutils, so the moving and symlinking has to be redone after each such an update. I was kind of hoping at first that aliases would do the same thing, but the configure scripts seem to work by absolute paths (which is probably for security reasons)._________________Quid latine dictum sit altum videtur

i´ve installed gentoo on my powermac g5 in the last days. everything works perfectly, i´ve got a working X Configuration and this makes me very happy.
it ist the first time i tried gentoo and i am really not familiar with USE-Flags, emerge and all that stuff.

Thanks to the community for this information, witch was very very helpful:

See the last messages in this thread for the patch thingy. Mozilla won't run but will compile and epiphany works well linked against the resulting installation.

By the way, this is all about mozilla 1.7; there is a newer one out there, but still not keyworded ppc64. Does anybody know whether it will work on PPC64? I might try it out (a working mozilla will be nice, eh?) but I am not holding my breath._________________Quid latine dictum sit altum videtur

i don't own yet a ppc(64) but to log in you don't need a password. i strongly advise you to set one after you logged in

Code:

passwd

because the procedure changed and has been made more secure. you're permitted to login once without a password but to use another console (which i do everytime while installing gentoo - to download packages on another console, creating/changing configs on the third etc.) you MUST set a password._________________Easily backup up your system? klick
Get rid of SSH Brute Force Attempts / Script Kiddies klick

I have not had any success in booting my dual 1.8 GHz G5 with the PPC64 2004.2 CD (Beta 3). I burned the iso twice (once with nautilus-cd-burner from my ibook and again from OSX with toast) with the same results. The display freezes at the following point:

The machine then freezes, and the fans slowly start to rev. After a brief time the computer reboots. My G5 is a 'base' model except for: 1) upgrading the HD to 160; 2) memory to 1G; 3) graphics card to
Radeon 9600XT.

I have not had any success in booting my dual 1.8 GHz G5 with the PPC64 2004.2 CD (Beta 3). I burned the iso twice (once with nautilus-cd-burner from my ibook and again from OSX with toast) with the same results. The display freezes at the following point:

The machine then freezes, and the fans slowly start to rev. After a brief time the computer reboots. My G5 is a 'base' model except for: 1) upgrading the HD to 160; 2) memory to 1G; 3) graphics card to
Radeon 9600XT.

Has anyone had this issue?

i have the same dual-1.8, 512mb, 80gb, and 9600xt. my machine stops at the same core99_setup_cpu 0 done. i have tried 2 gentoo ppc64 cds, the gentoo 2004.2 ppc universal and the latest debian ppc cd. none will boot. i'm beginning to think this is an issues with the dual-1.8 systems as people with dual-2.0 are able to boot/install. i'm willing to try/test anything. luckily i dont need gentoo on this machine, but it would be nice._________________ubuntu.

Thanks for commiserating with me. It is frustrating to see others having success with ppc64 and not being able to boot anything linux on my box. I have to admit that it has been educational learning about the 'quirks' of installing necessary apps on OSX and I am surviving but......

I guess I will be patient with the knowledge that my future linux partition is emty and ready to go. If only panther had a way to access a non-graphical terminal I would be more content. If you can command+alt+A into an X-server why is there no command+alt+B into a terminal?

I got Gentoo 2006.0 up and running on my dual 1.8 G5 last night. emerged a few things including my fav editor, vim. However I'm having the same issue as bruda mentioned in the first post: vim segfaults on exit (before changes to the files are saved). Is anyone aware of a cause or solution for this? My CFLAGS have -O2 plus -mcpu=970 etc (at work now so going from memory).